There are professionals who perform Microsoft SQL Server administration. They are experts in managing databases. This may be a field more suited to larger corporations who have large amounts of data to process. What about you at home who doesn’t have as much data in your hard drives? Do you have any idea of what system administration is? Let’s discuss that.
What Is an Administrator?
When you first fire it up, Windows will give you a choice if you want to have the role of the administrator. This is the default if you are the first user of the system. Being an administrator gives you all the rights to all the features of the OS. As long as you are the user who is logged in, you are able to use these.
That is the gist of being an administrator. It’s just you being given permission to access whatever the system has to offer. At this point, you have the right to add more user accounts. And you also have the choice to make them administrators or users.
In comparison, the user has fewer permissions. One of the restrictions is usually the ability to change files in the common libraries. In Windows, these include the default folders like My Documents and My Pictures.
What Does an Administrator Do?
So you have put all the other members of your family as users. One of your kids goes to you and asks why he is unable to install a game that he wants to play in a certain folder. You then explain to him that he does not have access to that folder. Seeing that this does not seem to be an issue, you try to give him access to the folder. You go ahead and enter your credentials, and you tick the box that will allow him to use it.
That is being an administrator in a nutshell. Users will ask for access, and you will then assess if these will not cause any issues to your system. Once you deem that everything is okay, you can decide on allowing it.
Outside of the home and into businesses, administrators have greater responsibilities. There are many more factors to consider before approving something. They will have to think of multiple scenarios where it can go wrong before deciding on giving the go signal. They also deal with both software and hardware approvals. They are there to manage the whole system.
More people from different backgrounds and roles come to them. The administrators are not the sole decision-makers. They need to go through various department heads just to get more information about the employee and the purpose of the request. If they get enough confirmation, they will then give approval. All of these will have to be documented so that they can trace it back in case something bad happens.
The security of the whole system relies on many experts, and administrators are some of them. They are the ones who can see the bigger picture with every permission they grant to people. It is a tremendous responsibility. So if your request was rejected, you can rest easy knowing that time and effort were spent in reaching that decision.